The scope of this book jumps out of its title. Moving across a huge swath of time and covering the entire world’s sugar zones, Ulbe Bosma challenges the reader to keep up. His perspective reveals unexpected connections for those of us immersed in studies of commodities at the regional or even national levels. Bosma achieves remarkable coherence, given the differences between ancient peasant sugar production in Asia, early modern state-led sugar projects along the Nile, and plantation societies in the Americas, to mention just three contexts. He pays sustained attention to technology and trade, policy, and labor dynamics and crafts a narrative that propels the reader briskly through time and space, repeatedly pointing toward the commonalities and kinships that make sugar elites, processing, and trading look remarkably similar around the world, especially in the past century and a half.

Bosma maneuvers sugar into a central place in the operations of...

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